Tsvangirai: For whom the bell tolls

government elections are finally upon us, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is clearly running terribly scared of the impending elections. Very, very scared.
The clear evidence of Tsvangirai’s growing electoral fear was not for the first time on full display last Friday in Binga where he used his party’s poorly attended rally – that was defined more by demonstrations against his new homosexuality manifesto than anything else – to falsely claim in a reckless manner that President Mugabe confided in him last Monday that he is ready to step down but is allegedly being prevented from doing so by some elements in Zanu-PF.
Instructively, most Zimbabweans and key independent observers would be aware that this incredulous claim comes hot on the heels of a number of recent and futile calls by Tsvangirai on President Mugabe to retire and to allow him to take-over simply and only because he says he is younger than the President.
How on earth does Tsvangirai expect to be taken seriously by anyone even among his dwindling band of blind supporters when he shamelessly spends weeks on end making highly publicised inane calls at content-less political rallies for President Mugabe to retire as a political favour to him on account of what he claims is his young age and – after being ignored and even derided for his childish calls – only to turn up in Binga with silly allegations that President Mugabe has confided in him that he is ready to step down in a misguided bid to contain the storm against his hugely unpopular homosexuality manifesto?
Does Tsvangirai, who has been nicknamed as “Morgay” in response to his new homosexual election platform, really imagine that there’s any sane and normal Zimbabwean who believes that President Mugabe can confide in him about anything? Anything at all? Anyone who believes that will most definitely believe anything.
There are five reasons in the talk of the town in Harare which explain why, as he runs scared of the forthcoming elections, Tsvangirai has gone bonkers with his mindless calls for President Mugabe to retire and whose latest twist is his dubious claim that the President has confided in him that he wants to step down but is being held back by some imaginary Zanu PF hardliners.
First, there’s impeccable and in fact unimpeachable information which shows that about four or so months ago the Permanent Secretary in the Prime Minister’s office, Ian Makone, decided in contravention of public service regulations to make the office “very, very partisan” for purposes of launching Tsvangirai’s election campaign build around purported provincial tours and partisan political rallies funded by taxpayers.
The Prime Minister’s office is thus now “very, very partisan” by design in order to siphon public funds to support an MDC-T political agenda to legalise homosexuality in Zimbabwe.
While the evidence seen by this writer shows beyond doubt that the transformation of the Prime Minister’s office into a partisan political outfit is now a done deal at the instigation of Ian Makone, the same evidence also shows that the Prime Minister’s office has a message problem in that it has failed to come up with a coherent and appealing program to offer the electorate.
What the office has come up with thus far are planned smear campaigns against a list of targeted individuals who are presumed to be strategic in Zanu-PF.
In one such case about which the evidence is as clear as daylight, Thabani Mpofu has been tasked by Ian Makone with the knowledge of Tsvangirai to work on a falsified dossier against Commissioner General Augustine Chihuri which Mpofu has said is intended for the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.
The same Mpofu has also been tasked by the same Ian Makone to abuse government funds on an initiative to derail and smear the Government’s indigenisation policy whose implementation the Prime Minister is supposed to spearhead through Ian Makone’s office. If this is not a scandal of untold proportions, then nothing is.
With no programme besides an ill-fated smear campaign against designated Zanu-PF individuals and with plenty of Government funds in its pocket to abuse after transforming itself into “a very, very partisan” outfit, the Prime Minister’s office has been left with no choice but to parade Tsvangirai before the electorate not because he has anything to offer but simply and only because he claims to be younger than President Mugabe as if these guys don’t know that age ain’t nothing but a number.
This explains the first reason why Tsvangirai is running scared of the impending elections: he knows he is up against a principled, experienced and iconic candidate who through Zanu-PF has something very revolutionary and tangible to offer the electorate through indigenisation and economic empowerment.
As for the second reason, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realise that Tsvangirai knows better than anyone else that, all things being equal, he has no chance in heaven against President Mugabe in a presidential election whose background, environment and conduct are neither driven by the winds of protest politics nor hijacked by merchants of regime change.
This is why Tsvangirai is doing everything, including some very foolish things for somebody holding the office of Prime Minister, to throw all sorts of mud at President Mugabe’s candidacy in the vain hope of derailing it through what would be a technical knockout should the President do the unthinkable and step down.
The thinking, if you can call it that, about this in the Prime Minister’s office is that President Mugabe will be impossible to defeat because, compared to other potential candidates whom Tsvangirai does not apparently fear, he is the only leader in Zanu-PF capable of uniting the party and inspiring the nation, especially the voting group between 18 to 35 years of age who have taken to his leadership in very defining Chimurenga ways.
This leads to the third reason why Tsvangirai is losing his marbles and becoming very, very scared of the forthcoming election and becoming desperate to the point of not only lying that President Mugabe has confided in him that he wants to step down but also of adopting homosexuality as his new election manifesto.
The reason for all of this is simply that, as revealed by Roy Bennett at various forums including Wikileaks, the MDC-T’s participation in the GPA government has cost it its only comparative advantage as an election campaigning party relying on the winds of protest but with no ideology and no capacity to govern.
The opposition winds of protest will not benefit the MDC-T this time round because it is a major element of the Government of the day and will have to run as a governing party and not as an opposition party as before.
This unavoidable prospect is scaring Tsvangirai to death not least because he knows that he has been delinquent as Prime Minister running a “very, very partisan” office.
With this background, especially the fact that the MDC-T has no policy to offer the electorate besides legalising homosexuality, the fourth reason why Tsvangirai is running scared of the imminent elections is that he now knows that everybody else knows that he does not have the gravitas to be President.
In other words, he is not presidential material. This is as much the view of his British and American founders and funders – who are now distancing themselves from his as evidenced by their refusal to meet him during his last visits to the US and Britain respectively – as it is of his closest lieutenants in his party including the likes of Tendai Biti and Nelson Chamisa who are the new donor favourites in the embattled MDC T.
In his controversial Memoirs, At the Deep End poorly written by William Bango, Tsvangirai acknowledges that he is not leadership material and confesses that he leapfrogged the late Gibson Sibanda whom he admits was more deserving of the presidency of the MDC in 1999 than him purely on tribal grounds.
He also reveals in the same book that his MDC-T party had all but died after the 2005 elections in which Zanu-PF won a two thirds majority only to be given a new lease of leaf by the unfortunate events of March 11, 2007 when he was allegedly beaten up at a police station in Harare and describes what happened thereafter as “the rewards of torture” without which he would not be Prime Minister today.
The fifth and last reason why Tsvangirai is running scared is that while he has thus far been hoping against hope that his Western backers would abuse the GPA and manipulate Sadc to secure an extrajudicial victory for him at the next polls or abuse Chapter VII provisions of the UN Charter to frame a resolution against Zimbabwe similar to Libya’s resolution 1973 which was made possible by treacherous votes from South Africa, Nigeria and Gabon.
the fact is that the imposition of puppet governments in the Ivory Coast and Libya and the Wikileaks revelations of the games that the US has been playing with some Sadc countries around issues such as the so-called security sector reform, have combined to put paid to having the same in any other African country let alone in Zimbabwe. In the circumstances, Tsvangirai is on the loose out in the cold, flip flopping as always and making gaffe after gaffe while telling green lies all over the place especially about President Mugabe and pursing his new thrust to legalise homosexuality in Zimbabwe.
He is obviously in a self-destructive mode as the electoral clock ticks towards judgement day whose outcome against him is now written on the wall while Tsvangirai, who cannot swim, struggles to figure out how to make his way from the deep end at the risk of drowning.

l Professor Jonathan Moyo is a renowned academic, legislator for Tsholotsho North, Zanu-PF Politburo member and former minister of media, information and publicity.